Monster in the Shadows
by DB Sommer
Summary: [Altuni after episode 26] Light is openly challenged by a group of Serial Killers, but is there a more malevent force behind them?


Monster in the Shadows A Death Note xover

Any and all C+C appreciated. You can contact me at: the previous chapters and my other works are stored at:

Larry F's new address at:  
newer works at Mediaminer Disclaimer: I do not own any of the rights to Death Note or the series this crossed over with. It is owned by Tsugumi Ohba and licensed by Viz.

Writer's note: Just an idea that occurred to me after the events of episode 25. It's an Alt-uni from after that point. It does contain spoilers for the events from that episode.

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Light Yagami was not happy.

He should have been. L, Rem, and every other obstacle to the world's salvation had died all in one fell swoop, just as Light had planned months before when he yielded ownership of the Death Note to another. The plan had been executed perfectly, proving once and for all his superiority over L.

Once all of Light's threats were removed, the true revolution began. The deaths of the murderers and scum of the planet, and the very public message it sent, were being heard. The other so-called authorities of the world had been proven impotent in the face of Kira, and the public was slowly acknowledging him as their savior, that they should follow the one true way he was showing them. That was how it began. Like an avalanche, it would start slowly, then build up steam as others joined the cause, multiplying until eventually the entire world would obey him as it should. He would be followed like no other in the history of mankind.

He was much better than God. Light actually did things to help people.

But now there was an interruption in the plan, a stumbling block that threatened to delay everything. A group of serial killers operating in Europe calling themselves the 'Thrillkillaz', had begun murdering people all across the continent. While the murders themselves were not spectacular, the Thrillkillaz were sending messages to the press, who were highly publicizing their exploits, making them seem larger than life. There was also another reason the press were so eager to put every murder on the front page.

The Thrillkillaz were openly challenging Kira to stop them.

And that was where the problem truly lie. They were challenging Light's authority. Worse, they were getting away with it. Every murder committed was expertly planned and executed. The police had no leads to go on. That there was no pattern to the killings only made it worse, and they seemed to be operating anywhere in the continent. There had to be more than one killer as well. Three murders occurred at the same time in different countries. That meant an organization. One headed by at least one brilliant killer who was orchestrating the whole thing, maximizing publicity while minimizing exposure.

Light's efforts were being undermined. Others were becoming emboldened by the behavior. Kira had gone from being the rebel to being rebelled against. A number of copycats had come out of the woodwork, killing individuals or groups of people and claiming they were one of the Thrillkillaz. But their clumsy methods, lack of knowledge about previous crimes, and usually gross stupidity identified them as fakes. Not that it stopped Light from killing them in their cells once the investigating police confirmed they were copycats.

There had been an anomaly which disturbed Light. One of the copycats had been misidentified by the police. While it had quickly become obvious he wasn't a real 'Thrillkilla', when Light wrote his name in the Death Note, nothing had happened. Luckily, as the new L, he had legitimate connections to the police now. It had taken a few very subtle hints to have them look closer into the man's true nature. It turned out he had assumed the identity of Yosef Goldstein, a person that was really dead. Had been for years. The imposter had used Yosef's name for so long he was in the system in multiple places under that identity. They had been forced to investigate three whole months before determining his real name. It had taken so long Light had been tempted to get the police to give him a live camera feed so Misa could look at the killer with her Shinigami eyes and just tell it to Light. Luckily, the police eventually tracked down his real identity, and his name ended up in the book, like all the others.

And there was one other thing that disturbed Light. Something about this whole event. It felt calculated in some way. Of course, there was calculating involved, otherwise the killers would have been caught. No, it felt like there was some other purpose other than giving Kira the metaphorical finger.

It almost felt like something L would do.

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He looked over the information before Him once again. One last summation of all He had learned about Kira since He decided to focus his attention on this enigma who had made it his life's work to eradicate all monsters. It was a quixotic quest, of course, one doomed to failure from the beginning. Everyone had a monster inside them. That was the nature of humanity. The odds dictated circumstances would arise that some monsters would be given birth and unleashed upon the world.

After all, wasn't that what had happened to Him?

In any event, Kira had to be dealt with. Should Kira learn of His existence, Kira would kill Him without a second's thought. In some ways, the fact that people like Him existed might have been what gave birth to Kira. How many had He killed over the last twenty plus years? Not so much personally, those only ran in the dozens, but how many had He manipulated into killing others? Thousands, at least. It was easy. He understood people. He understood how to allow their monsters to emerge and ran rampant, consuming all around them.

And now, after months of research, He thought He had an understanding of Kira as well.

While His cultivated connections with members of various European law enforcement agencies had allowed Him all the information that could be gathered on Kira, He tried to avoid reading their conclusions until after He had made His own. There was no sense in tainting His assessment with their opinions, and He trusted His judgment better than theirs.

Some conclusions were easier than others.

Kira was not omnipotent: This was very important, since, if he was, there would be no sense in moving against him. But there were some very obvious limits on his abilities. Limits that could be exploited.

Kira was brilliant: Even with the eyes of the world, including the planet's acknowledged greatest detective, L, trying to stop him, he had eluded capture so far.

Kira was young: in the beginning, no older than his late twenties, and probably younger. Believing one could change the world was a fantasy of youth, not the old, who knew better. Yes, he was young enough to be full of nothing but optimism in his goals.

Kira had a messiah complex: that was painfully obvious in every one of his declarations. However he was not the least bit religious. It was the exact opposite. He wasn't doing this for god. He believed he was god.

Kira was always in control of himself: he never panicked or was sloppy. Always handling a situation, and operated from a sincere belief that no matter how bad it got, he could regain control.

In real life, Kira was unknown: That was determined in how he acknowledged his existence to the public for the first time. It showed his inexperience, and his desire to be recognized by the world. A public figure would have done it differently.

Kira possessed powers that have never been seen before: No one had ever been able to utilize death the way he did. There was no science that could come close to doing what he could accomplish. No one in history had ever possessed such abilities as well. While a benign individual might have possessed this remarkable ability and refused to use it, or in a very limited way, someone would eventually have done what Kira was doing, even if only on a small scale. That meant the power only recently sprang into existence.

The power could either be duplicated or stolen: It was obvious the second Kira could do the same thing the first Kira had done. There had been a third as well, though he had been killed, probably by the first, though it could also have been some other outside agency. In any case, Kira would never willingly share his mantle of power, especially with the amazingly stupid second Kira. That this ability was not unique to Kira was very, very important. It meant that….

…Kira was given the power by another agency. Anyone as brilliant as Kira would never waste his time trying to create something so fantastic. No, this thing was the creation of someone foolish, yet intelligent. A dreamer. It was possible it was accidentally created, but that seemed unlikely. The death ability was too precise. Too refined. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was a precision thing, and created to be that way. Kira either stumbled on the power or was given it, just like the other two Kiras.

There was a brief period of time when Kira wasn't killing anyone: That was when the third Kira operated. He could tell right away that there was something different about the way the criminals were being killed at that time. An almost careless disregard for who they were, as though they were simply names drawn from out of a hat rather than people whom Kira actively wanted dead. That was very, very surprising. He could not conceive Kira willingly giving up killing criminals. For all of Kira's posturing, he was a serial killer. By now he might have surpassed Him in total number of deaths. Kira might be able to reign in his desires for a while, but he could never do it for nay true length of time. The monster inside him was awake, and would never let him sleep for overlong. Of course, shortly after the death of the third Kira, the first became active again with a vengeance, making up for lost time. Something happened that made the first Kira stop killing. Something tied to the third, perhaps. More information on that was necessary.

And then there were the limitations on Kira's death abilities. At first glance it would appear he could sweep his icy hand of death to anyone and kill them with his touch, but when one dug a little deeper, one discovered that there were some serious limitations on the ability.

Vulnerability: Kira operated from the shadows because he could be stopped. He was mortal. He was afraid of being discovered. Especially in the early days, he went out of his way to dissuade people from looking for him. That meant while he could kill anyone, his power did not make him had to be stopped. If his identity was successfully discovered, it was over for him.

The death touch could reach anywhere: however its targeting ability was limited. Kira only killed caught criminals, or ones in the midst of a crime. He had yet to dispatch some murderer that had not been identified by the authorities. While it could be he wanted to be sure the people were genuinely guilty of their crimes, what it meant for Him was that Kira could not read minds. That was very important. That fact would dictate how to approach the Kira situation.

Kira's information was limited to the real world: Kira had never killed anyone, claiming he had knowledge about the individual that no one else in the world did. He relied on others to find the guilty for him.

The last confident bit of information on the limitations of the death touch had taken a bit longer to determine. It was a refinement on what Kira needed to kill someone, and He was pretty sure He had discovered a damning limit.

Using contacts in the various European law enforcement agencies, He had cross-referenced all the Kira material known by the police and come up with an interesting fact. While Kira went out of his way to kill any murderer around the globe, there was one area where he was sorely lacking: rural areas of third world nations. Not the major cities of those nations, but the areas away from them. The rate of Kira deaths in those areas was next to nothing. That was opposed to the rural areas of developed countries. Those rates were much higher. That was not to say no one in rural areas of third world nations escaped his touch. There were some, but in that, there was the damning evidence. The ones he killed out there had one single, solitary common factor: pictures.

Out in the middle of nowhere, the authorities had little in the way of technology to share with the big cities. They tended to just fill out documentation on the killers, which sufficed. Pictures of the guilty were difficult to come by. Yet every one of these third world rural criminals that Kira killed had had his picture taken and registered in a police database. Kira had never killed anyone who didn't. That came to one unmistakable conclusion.

Kira needed a face to kill.

And then there was last bit of the puzzle. A theory He had, but needed testing. So He created the Thrillkillaz. The slap in the face they represented to Kira could not be tolerated by him. Despite that, not one of the three genuine members had been caught (thanks to His planning of all the crimes) or killed, which bore out His beliefs about Kira's limitations. The inevitable copycats were done away with in their cells soon enough, when it was proven they had no connection to the real Thrillkillaz, but that too had been taken into account. Had been counted on, in fact.

After the preliminary evidence was in, it was time to test another theory. He set up a copycat serial killer to be caught by the authorities. It was easy acting through an intermediary to get the man to murder in the name of the Thrillkillaz --He had been getting serial killers to do his bidding for years--, and more importantly, He had made certain the man was caught. It was all very public, which was what He wanted. After it was determined the guy had no actual connection with the Thrillkillaz (though ironically he did, in a secondhand way), he should have been killed in his cell, like all the other copycats had. But he hadn't, and there was only one thing that made him different from all the other copycats.

Yosef Goldstein was an assumed name.

After three months of his continued survival, which was two months more than any other copycat, including ones caught after him, He secretly provided the police with Yosef's real name.

He was dead twenty-four hours later.

Kira needed a person's name to go with the face.

Those were the main factors known about Kira. That was enough for Him to have an understanding of the sort of person Kira was. And understanding was the key to his destruction, the same as it was to anyone else. Now that the limits on the situation had been determined, it was time to deal with Kira once and for all. Since Kira's location was well known, He had been moving resources into the area to aid him in his plan. It had taken time to cultivate resources in Japan, since He operated primarily in Europe, but it had been with the expenditure in effort. Everything was in place, and it was time to set things into motion.

Then it would come down to just Him and Kira, and if He could figure out who Kira was before Kira could figure out who was stalking him. Of course He had an advantage: There was only one person left who knew his real name, one that could attach it to his face. And what where the chances his twin sister, Anna, would ever end up in Japan and come across Kira and happen to mention His real name?

The blond youth, known to many as Johan Liebert, smiled. This promised to be an interesting game. It wasn't often he met someone with a monster inside them nearly as big as his.

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End fic

Johan Liebert is from Monster, a really good series you ought to watch.

Writer's end notes: Really this is just an idea, and a fairly obvious one. It would be a potentially interesting battle of wits. While Johan is almost certainly the brighter of the two, his real edge is his unnatural ability to get inside people's heads and make them jump the way he wants. Of course he is hampered by the fact his schemes would make Machiavelli take notes, while Light is direct whenever he is able. Light is brilliant himself and would have advantages in having a greater abilities, but barring getting the shinigami eyes or using Misa's, determining Johan's birth name would be next to impossible. Mostly I think it would come down to who could identify the other first. Johan would have an advantage over L in that he would resort to any means to determine if Light was Kira if he suspected it.

Now, unlike many other fics, I have no intention of running with this idea, since I don't have the time for it. Anyone else wants to utilize the set up, they can take it and run.

DB Sommer 


End file.
